I feel like the best analogy for this type of geology is a frozen lake. The ice moves and creates mountains and… um cracks. Lucky we don’t get that on earth but it’s still a nice analogy
We do get cracks. They’re the divergent plate boundaries. Water and ice just flow on time scales far too dissimilar to make an appropriate rate model at the cracks.
I wonder if you could make a decent model of plate tectonics with wax. Have a pan of wax heated from below, deep enough that the top is cool enough to be solid.
Ooh, interesting! Perhaps if you cooled the top and heated the bottom quickly enough? The biggest problem is that the convective drag needs to be high enough to cause actual subduction. In my Earth Science class, I just add mica powder to water, heat it from below, and show them Rayleigh-Benard convection cells.
I feel like the best analogy for this type of geology is a frozen lake. The ice moves and creates mountains and… um cracks. Lucky we don’t get that on earth but it’s still a nice analogy
We do get cracks. They’re the divergent plate boundaries. Water and ice just flow on time scales far too dissimilar to make an appropriate rate model at the cracks.
I wonder if you could make a decent model of plate tectonics with wax. Have a pan of wax heated from below, deep enough that the top is cool enough to be solid.
Ooh, interesting! Perhaps if you cooled the top and heated the bottom quickly enough? The biggest problem is that the convective drag needs to be high enough to cause actual subduction. In my Earth Science class, I just add mica powder to water, heat it from below, and show them Rayleigh-Benard convection cells.